Tom Piccirilli - Emerald Hell

Another woman fell atop him and clung to Hellboy's back. She dug her fingernails in, and he realized they were actually thistles and barbs for easily rending flesh. She dug them in deeply, and he let out a cry, trying to tear her free. After whirling about, he managed to get a hand on her wrist and tug her arm loose from the shoulder.

She writhed in the cypress overhead, beckoning with her remaining fingers, and moved to him again.

Hellboy thought, What I wouldn't give for some industrial strength weed-killer.

There was still a loving expression on that lovely face, the catfish eyes empty of any humanity. He hit it again, and again, and once more until the woman's body tore free from the tendril. She dropped motionless beside one of the dying men laid out in his aisle. The guy lethargically propped himself in the mud and started wailing as his girlie sank into the slime.

The tittering grew louder until it was more like a scream in the underbrush. The cypress shook and rattled, more women gliding in and rising from the waters, joining the fray. He couldn't keep this up much longer the way he was feeling. His thoughts were still sluggish, his head stuffed with cotton and razors.

Hellboy called, "Lament! John Lament! Get your hillbilly butt up, I need some help here! All you other guys, if you want to live then come on, fight! Fight it!"

He slogged ahead and spotted the flash of metal again, near his feet. He stormed forward and found his pistol half-buried in weeds, caked with mud and slough. He quickly tried to clean it on his coat but nothing was helping much.

"Son of a-"

Another marionette dropped on him and he drew back his fist to pummel it, but its jaws cracked wide and its neck distended like a snake's to fit his stone hand down its throat.

He tried to pull free but the girlie tightened her hold and began gnawing her way up his arm.

Terrific.

He was already trying to figure out what he was going to put in his report and what he'd leave out. Some of this stuff was pretty embarrassing.

The girlie began moaning with hideously false noises. He pressed the gun to her forehead and saw the barrel ease into the flesh-like fibrous growth. He pulled the trigger and the barrel exploded.

Agony lanced through his left hand and he cried out. The force threw him backward into the shallows and the human skull in the girlie's head came along with him in a splash of bayou silt.

How do you kill a weed? You have to tear it out by the root.

Ml the girlies started rushing forward in unison, trying to drink the blood from his wounded hand. Lament raised his head and began to fight with the creatures too, like some kind of celebrity being mobbed by fans, sinking beneath their numbers. They dragged him away deeper into the ooze.

After wetting a bandana and wrapping it around his neck, Duffy Ferris pointed to the inlet at the base of the dark lake and said, "I see they broke camp over that'a'way this mornin'. There's still a faint trail of smoke risin' from the last of their embers."

"I see it too,"Deeter said. "That's gator ground."

"Crossed over to the other side and goin' deeper into the morass. Notice where they tore up the twigs passin' through? All the mud they raked up and log litter they broke past? We comin' up to the marsh prairies. We're only two, three hours behind 'em."

"I spot two cold camps," Deeter said, shielding his eyes from the sun."One a bit aways from the other. Them teenage girls come through this way too, mayhap the night before. None'a them are gator bait yet."

"Which ain't to say there ain't still a chance for it."

"No, which ain't to say that at all. Gotta admire them girls' pluck though. All of 'em with child. Ain't a one of 'em that's what you might call weak-willed."

Duffy grabbed the pole and began stobbing again, his muscles corded and the thick veins twisting along his arms. "You think Dorrie Mae Wilkes is among 'em?"

Deeter furrowed his brow. "Which one's that?"

"Pretty young thing, blonde hair halfway down her back, fine shapely figure on her. She won Miss Peach Pit over in Waynescross last summer, rode up front on the float during the Peach Pit Parade. You don't recall?"

"Wilkes's got four girls, so I'm havin' some trouble decipherin' which particular one she might be."

"Don't matter none." With nostrils flaring, Duffy sniffed the air. "You smell it?"

"Can't smell me nothin' but that ole boy gettin' riper in the back of the damn boat."

"Corn griddle cakes. And fried turtle eggs. No breeze here to carry the aroma off,"

"Yeah?" Deeter put a hand on his belly as it emitted an audible growl. "Them boys are livin' the honeyed life out here, for certain. Wish we could stop for some food. It's gettin' on lunchtime."

Duffy whispered, "That Jester don't eat but what he finds flattened dead on a broken white line, so I guess he expects the same of us. How I do wish we never run into that hell preacher."

"No more so than me," Deeter said. "Bless my ears, I hear him still conversin' with that deceased codger."

"Naw, he done quit that a while back. Guess ole Plume Wallace wasn't reciprocatin' enough. Now preacher's just prayin', except they ain't like no prayers I done heard any man mutter before."

The Ferris boys turned together to check on Brother Jester, who sat in the stern of the skiff with the corpse, doing little besides mumbling and staring. The flies were so heavy back there that a dark cloud hovered and wreathed about Jester, who didn't seem to notice.

They both thought, He gonna eat that old boy?

Jester's shadows let him know this. It almost made him smile.

He'd eaten much worse things than human flesh. He'd supped on his own venom, he'd swallowed the tenets of God's law. He'd drank from puddles of rain provided by the great seraphim. Warm waters which tasted of the great flood and Noah's destroyed earth. Tasting God's wrath and the near-end of humanity in stagnant pools by a roadside-now that weighed on a man's heart. Or it would've, if Brother Jester had still been a man.

The silver whipcord thread chimed beside him and he felt the impeding return of Plume Wallace's ghost rushing toward the skiff.

After a moment the spirit appeared and jester asked, "How went your mission?"

"Weren't no damn mission," the bound ghost said, "just a wrong-hearted errand you sent me on. Like we dead got nothing better to do all the long day but attend your beck and call. My first wife Ettie, now she was a lot like you, son. Would get it into her head at all crazy hours of the night that she needed herself some Epsom salts for her foot bath, like I'm'a gonna go be able to find her salts at three in the morning just 'cause she got bad corns. Yeah, you and Ettie got a lot in common-"

"I want an answer," Jester said. There were just as many flies crawling across his forehead as there were on Plume Wallace's ashen brow. "What did you see?"

"You already know what I saw, you sent me to go see it."

"Stop being contrary."

"The morning a man's murdered for his boat and his poor wracked body brought along on a snipe chase is a day meant for bein' cantankerous, I say. But all right, all right, I'll tell you what you crave. I seen John Lament, growed up. Side by side with a big red fella lookin' a little dinged up hisself. They're up yonder, across the basin in a bad patch of land, where the wind is colder and the jungle got itself teeth." The ghost grinned with its ethereal lips. "John Lament. All these years gone and still you a'fear him, the one who was just a boy at your bent knee, learning the ways of God by your very own tutelage."

"I know his past as I know my own. I didn't ask you about that."